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Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Alan Haselhurst): Order. The hon. Gentleman should resume his seat for a moment. I am extremely sorry to have to interrupt his maiden speech. I have allowed him considerable latitude, but he will have heard Madam Speaker say that police and security matters are expressly excluded from the compass of this debate. I have made every allowance for the fact that he has been making his maiden speech, but I really must ask him not to pursue security or police matters in the remainder of his remarks.
Mr. Thompson: Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I had no intention of discussing the police or security budget; I was discussing the relationship of that budget with the one that we are debating. That budget was previously kept separate from the Northern Ireland Office and was not cash-limited; we were told that when we had peace in Northern Ireland, part of it was transferred to the Department and we benefited in some way from it, but now, as there is no longer peace, that money has been taken away. We need clarification on that.
Mr. Laurence Robertson (Tewkesbury): I congratulate the hon. Member for West Tyrone (Mr. Thompson) on a tremendously confident and, if I may say so, competent speech. I am always greatly impressed by the passion with which Northern Ireland Members speak and the love that they have for their constituencies and the Province that they represent. The hon. Gentleman mentioned that he is here by virtue of the creation of a new seat in Northern Ireland. I am familiar with such feelings, because mine is also a new seat, although in a different part of the country--Gloucestershire.
I hope that Northern Ireland Members will forgive me for intruding, as an English Member, on the debate. There is no reason why people should know this, but I made my maiden speech on the subject of Scottish devolution simply because, although I am not Scottish or from Northern Ireland, I have a great passion for the United Kingdom.
I congratulate Ministers and shadow Ministers on their appointments to the Front Benches. There are many other issues that concern Northern Ireland, but the defeat of the IRA and all violence in the Province must be the first priority. I recognise the need for regeneration and I should like to mention a few aspects that could help the process; they may be novel ideas, but they deserve a mention.
Some time ago, we witnessed the advent of mixed schools in Northern Ireland that children from all traditions could attend. What provision is there for the continuation and encouragement of that process? Local democracy was mentioned earlier; I urge caution on moving towards proportional representation, but I want more specifically to ask what plans are in hand for the strengthening of local democracy--giving more powers to local government--in Northern Ireland to give people elected to councils something worthwhile to do.
On a recent visit to Northern Ireland, I observed that there was a good set-up for local government but that the elected representatives had little responsibility. I do not mean to be unkind--I am sure that Northern Ireland Members know what I mean. I am aware that there is a difficulty, in that some of the councillors elected in Belfast, for instance, are members of Sinn Fein, but we must consider what can be done about the situation. More peace might come to the Province if local people are able to have more power and control over what happens there.
Has an expanded enterprise zone for Belfast been considered, with more inducements for inward investment and companies perhaps paying less tax as an encouragement for them to come there in the first place, as an attempt to regenerate the Province?
Mr. Ken Maginnis (Fermanagh and South Tyrone):
I want to raise with the Minister the finance that is allocated to the various Departments in Northern Ireland. While no one disagrees with trying to achieve value for money, such is the stringency within Departments that the instructions that go down the line from, for example, the Department of Education to the education and library boards and to individual schools cause a great deal of waste and misdirected effort. I shall illustrate that by dealing with the provision of school meals in small rural primary schools.
In my constituency, where the community has suffered greatly over the years at the hands of terrorists, there have been extraneous pressures on society. It has been exceedingly difficult to maintain many of our small rural primary schools. There is a proposal to close 10 school kitchens in the part of the western board that is in my constituency and three in the part of the southern board that is in my constituency. One might imagine that that would release substantial resources to be ploughed into the classroom. In fact, the closure of those 13 kitchens will release about £28,000. The cost of social security benefits for the 13 cooks who will be made redundant will be about £30,000 or £32,000. In the schools budget, we save £28,000 but we lose more than that from the social security budget. That does not make sense. I will be told
that they are different budgets, but they are not. It all comes out of the same pot; it is all part of same cake. Someone must discover how we can save the cost, which has not been taken into account, of all the work done on the process that is called rationalisation of the school meals service in small schools but which actually loses money.
It is a question not only of money but of the future of small schools. Once their kitchens are removed, parents will become doubtful about whether the schools can continue to exist. They will ask whether it is the thin end of the wedge. They may decide that their children's future is no longer in the catchment area of the local school, so they will move closer to more viable schools. Perhaps the Government want that, but to me that is social engineering of the worst sort. We do not need such social engineering in Northern Ireland, above all places. Over the past 25 years or more, we have been trying to maintain stability in our society in Northern Ireland, but now we are tossing in a folly and calling it saving when it is the exact opposite of that. It is the destruction of the very thing that this Government, and the previous one, were publicly pledged to maintain.
The problem does not affect only the education system. I will not bore the Minister with similar examples in health and hospital services. I could give examples relating to the relocation of rates offices. Water and sewerage services were mentioned earlier. Through rationalisation, the people responsible for maintaining services are being taken further away from the areas where they work because someone thinks that it will save the electricity, light and heating costs of a small office that houses only six officers. No account seems to be taken of the extra travel involved or of the lack of contact with the people who are dependent on such services. I could go on, but there is a corollary to my point, and I hope that the Minister will give it serious consideration.
In Northern Ireland, the firm Mackie International has got into financial problems. I am not going to suggest how that happened, but I want to draw attention to the fact that the figures that were being published proved to be totally inaccurate. A large part of the industry concerned involved public funding several years ago. We must ask what has gone wrong, or whether anything has gone wrong that should not have, and whether anyone was culpable in respect of the way in which a business that had a large slice of public finance was handled.
Rev. Martin Smyth (Belfast, South):
I appreciate the opportunity to speak in this debate. I had not planned to do so because, in preparing for the debate with the customary modesty of the Ulster Unionists, we were leaving space for others to participate. However, with the customary loyalty of the people of Northern Ireland who rely on the Ulster Unionists to look after their interests,
I want to raise some of the issues, and to thank the hon. Member for Tewkesbury (Mr. Robertson) for his tribute to our new Member, my hon. Friend the Member for West Tyrone (Mr. Thompson). We appreciate his contribution. We understand that maiden speeches should be non-controversial but, within the context of the economy, we must face the fact that, as the Minister said when he opened the debate, other factors have an impact on the economy. My hon. Friend the Member for West Tyrone spoke with passion about his experiences in west Tyrone. There is no need for the hon. Member for Tewkesbury to apologise for being a Yorkshire man. One of the best Secretaries of State for Northern Ireland happened to be a Yorkshire man--[Hon. Members: "He was a Lancashire man."] I am sorry, I thought that he was from Yorkshire. We shall let the battle between the whites and the reds continue elsewhere. We appreciate hon. Members taking an interest in Northern Ireland, and the more who do so the better informed the House of Commons will be, so that people are not carried away by all the campaigns of the international terrorist movement and others.
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